A Spitfire Pilot's Story: Pat Hughes: Battle of Britain Top Gun

by Dennis Newton

  The struggle all of these squadrons would have to go through to become fully operational would be protracted and painful. Nos 235, 236, 248 and 254 were eventually transferred from Fighter Command to Coastal Command in January and February 1940. Manpower was needed too. So it was that at the end of October 1939, Flying Officer Paterson Clarence Hughes was posted from Church Fenton and 64 Squadron to join the newly forming 234 Squadron at RAF Leconfield.

  When he reached Leconfield via Hull he expected to find the Spitfires of 72 Squadron again but he could not see the ‘RN’ identification letters anywhere. The squadron had transferred from Church Fenton to Leconfield a few weeks earlier. Pat was on the lookout for a couple of familiar Aussie faces too, but they were not there either. He had just missed them. Desmond Sheen, Ron Lees and 72 Squadron had moved again already, north to Drem in Scotland.

  Pat noted the presence of a couple of Whitley bombers, some Fairey Battles, a few Miles Magister trainers and a number of old biplanes. When he asked what kind of station this was, he was told it was a bomber station, or it had been. Two Whitley squadrons had been stationed there before the war for operational training but they had moved out in mid-September under the Scatter Scheme.

  He did spy a few Spitfires but they had unfamiliar ‘YQ’ squadron code letters. These had only just arrived and belonged to 616 (South Yorkshire) Squadron. This was an Auxiliary Air Force unit and it had only been at Leconfield for a week having transferred over from Doncaster. Its previous equipment had been Gloster Gauntlet biplanes with fixed wheels but it had been training on four Fairey Battles supplied to it in May to accustom the pilots to flying monoplanes with retractable wheels. The Earl of Portland was the squadron’s Honorary Air Commodore and up to September 1939 its CO had been the Earl of Lincoln. The current CO, Squadron Leader Walter Beisiengel, was a well-known cricketer.3

  Now, two new squadrons were to be created at Leconfield at the very same time, 234 and 245. On paper, they were all both supposed to be fighter units, but the way things looked to Pat, they could be anything!

  Both 234 Squadron and 245 Squadron had their origins in the First World War. 234 Squadron had formed originally at Tresco on the Scilly Isles in August 1918 as a flying-boat unit for covering the Western Approaches. It had been formed from the RAF Seaplane Base there which had been already carrying out the task since February 1917. It stayed there until May 1919, when it was disbanded.

  Likewise, 245 squadron first flew as a coastal reconnaissance unit on anti-submarine patrols over the Irish Sea from Fishguard in Pembrokeshire and it was disbanded there in May 1919. Both squadrons were reformed on 30 October 1939, at Leconfield with a variety of non-operational types.

  The man appointed to command and form 234 Squadron was thirty-one-year-old Squadron Leader William Arthur John Satchell who had joined the RAF in March 1930. After training, he had been posted to 54 Squadron at Hornchurch flying Bristol Bulldogs but he transferred to the School of Naval Co-operation at Lee-on-Solent on 16 December 1932. He was posted on 5 June 1937 to 204 (General Reconnaissance) Squadron, which was equipped with Saunders-Roe London flying boats at Mount Batten, Plymouth. The following year in October he obtained a staff position there. 234 was his first command.

  Acting Flight Lieutenant John Graham Theilmann was given command of ‘A’ Flight. He had seniority over Pat having joined the RAF on a short service commission in January 1936 and receiving promotion to flying officer in July 1938, four months ahead of him. Theilmann’s previous unit had been 41 Squadron at Catterick. It had been equipped with Hawker Fury IIs up until January 1939 when it converted to brand-new Spitfire Is. He, at least, had experience on what promised to be the best fighter in the world. Pat saw this as a promising sign – Theilmann, at least, was a fighter type!

  A couple of pilots had arrived early. Pilot Officer Geoffrey Gout from Sevenoaks was a car enthusiast and had actually raced at Brooklands. He joined the RAF in February 1939 and was fresh from training. Pilot Officer Michael Boddington from Lancashire had flying experience having joined the RAFVR in December 1936. He had been one of the 3,000 Volunteer Reservists called up at the outbreak of the war.

  The new squadron’s start was far from auspicious. On 2 November, Bill Satchell was injured in a car accident and taken to hospital. When Pat arrived he was still in Hull Royal Infirmary where his condition was stable, but he was not able to return to his new command. He was replaced.

  Satchell’s position was taken over by Squadron Leader Richard ‘Dickie’ Barnett MBE. Barnett had graduated from Cranwell in December 1931 and joined 54 Squadron at Hornchurch. Posted overseas in September 1932, he joined 6 Squadron at Ismailia on 1 November. He went to the RAF Depot at Aboukir in July 1935. In the Coronation Honours List Barnett was made an MBE (11 March 1937) for operations in Palestine from April to October 1936. After returning to the UK he had been posted on 16 August 1938 to the Aeroplane and Armament Experimental Establishment at Martlesham Heath. He had gone with it to Boscombe Down in Wiltshire at the beginning of September before his rushed reappointment.

  Pat would take command of ‘B’ Flight and with this would come his promotion to acting flight lieutenant. Of course, his devoted canine companion would henceforth be known as ‘Flying Officer Butch’.

  New pilots began to arrive for the squadron. One of the first was Sergeant Alan Harker from Bolton in Lancashire on 5 November. He had joined the RAFVR in 1937 and, like Geoff Gout, had been called up at the outbreak of war. After a course on twin-engined Avro Ansons, he had volunteered for night fighters. More confusion – what exactly was the newly forming 234 Squadron supposed to be?

  The majority of the new pilots arrived the next day. It was raining as they were transported by truck from Hull. Among them was Pilot Officer Robert Doe who was originally from Reigate in Surrey. Bob Doe had started work as an office boy at the News of the World. In March 1938 he joined the RAFVR and began training at Hanworth, going solo on 4 June. He successfully applied for a short service commission and joined the RAF in January 1939. Before joining 234 Squadron at Leconfield, he did his elementary flying training at Redhill and then 6 FTS at Little Rissington. Doe recalled his arrival later:

  No one knew what sort of squadron it was, or what it was equipped with, and on a wet day in November we arrived at Hull to be taken by lorry to Leconfield. On asking the driver what the squadron was, he didn’t know, and we were eventually dropped at a wooden hut which turned out to be the officers mess. There we met the CO and the two Flight-Commanders, and they didn’t seem to know, either.4

  Among the others Pilot Officer Richard Hardy had joined the RAF on a short service commission a month after Bob Doe in February 1939. Pilot Officer Edward ‘Ted’ Mortimer-Rose was from Littleport, Cambridgeshire, and had been educated at Haileybury. He too had joined the RAF on a short service commission in February.

  Sergeant William ‘Bill’ Hornby had been a junior civil servant before the war. He joined the Royal Auxiliary Air Force in 1936 as an aircraft hand and transferred to the RAFVR in April 1937. He did his weekend flying at Hanworth and later at Stapleford. Like Alan Harker he had been posted to 10 FTS at Tern Hill in September before he joined 234 Squadron.5

  There were three New Zealanders. Pilot Officer Cecil Hight was from Stratford in the south-west of the north island where he was a car salesman. He began flying at the Western Federated Aero Club in 1937 and obtained his licence in August. Late that year he worked his passage to England, intending to join the RAF. Unable to first meet the educational requirements when he applied for a short service commission early in 1938, he studied maths and was provisionally accepted the next time he applied. After further training he was awarded his flying badge in early August 1939.

  Pilot Officer Patrick Horton had been born in Dunedin but he had been educated at the Hutchings School in Hobart, Tasmania, and Wellington College after which he worked for the Mines Department in 1936. After being provisionally accepted for an RAF short service commission, he had sailed for Englan
d on 1 February 1939 in the RMS Tainui.

  A fellow traveler aboard the Tainui for an RAF short service commission was Keith Lawrence, formerly a bank clerk in Invercargill. Pat Horton and Keith Lawrence remained together during training and they both joined the new 234 Squadron at Leconfield on 6 November.6

  Altogether that day, fourteen new young pilot officers and four sergeant pilots arrived as well as Squadron Leader Barnett. As for equipment, like Dowding’s other newly forming units, 234 Squadron did not have the up-to-date aircraft necessary to give the newly arriving pilots proper flying experience.

  According to 234’s Operations Record Book there were four Bristol Blenheims, apparently without gun belly packs; three Miles Magisters; two Avro Tutors; three Gloster Gauntlets, forerunners of Gloster’s Gladiators; and one Fairey Battle trainer with dual controls. They would have to make do with this strange assortment of machines. The squadron’s identifying letters were ‘AZ’ and its radio call sign was ‘Cressy’.

  A working routine commenced but from the outset flying had to be limited because of the desperate lack of aircraft. Pat and John Theilmann set about assessing the flying skills of their new charges whenever an aircraft was available and on whatever type it happened to be. The link trainer was put to good use. To the new young fliers a short trip in one of the Gauntlets was prized because it meant that they were in the air at last and nobody was looking over their shoulder or watching them from the co-pilot’s seat.

  The lack of flying time was due to lectures – many lectures. There were lectures on Fighter Command organisation; stripping and assembling Vickers and Browning machine guns; aircraft recognition, particularly the new German types; methods of fighter attacks; wireless; navigation; the organisation of the German Air Force; and so on.

  To the new pilots Pat tended to stand out. For a start, he was easy to find and approach. He wore his distinctive, much darker Royal Australian Air Force uniform which immediately set him apart from the others in their RAF light blue. There was an air of confidence about him which made him seem older and more mature than most, even though he was only in his early twenties. Flying Officer Butch went with him everywhere, even into the air when the chance arose. He was not a remote figure like the other two senior officers and increasingly he was looked to for guidance and motivation.

  Meanwhile, although 616 Squadron was envied because it was ‘working up’ on its Spitfires, the pilots seemed to be having a number of problems because of landing accidents. It was not unusual to see a Spitfire nose-up somewhere off the runway. Perhaps the speedy new machines were very difficult to handle.

  On 15 December, 234 Squadron had its own accident, and it was costly. The squadron’s official records reported:

  P/O J. Hemingway (detailed as safety officer) and P/O C. B. Elsdon (carrying out the practises) engaged in instrument flying practise in Magister. It went into a spin and crashed both suffered fractured spines and detained in RAF Hospital Cranwell.

  There was more it to than that. Historian Helen Doe looked closely into the episode:

  On the face of it this is the report of an accidental but serious crash but it was carefully written up to disguise an unfortunate incident. Elsdon and Hemingway had decided to beat up a train between York and Darlington. They eventually overdid it and ended up in a field. Unluckily for them here was a Group Captain on the train who witnessed the event and who was called into the inevitable Court of Inquiry. Elsdon was posted away immediately to Bomber Command but Hemingway was removed from the RAF.7

  Five days later, Geoff Gout crashed a Blenheim while taking off when he raised the undercarriage too soon and struck rising ground. He was not hurt but the aircraft suffered damage.

  At the same time, it was noticeable that Pat and John Theilmann were doing the bulk of the flying; Squadron Leader Barnett was noticeable for his absence from the air. The positive leadership that was needed for the new men to gain skill and confidence was being provided by his two acting flight lieutenants. Dickie Barnett looked the part. He was dark-haired, in his mid-thirties, and in attitude was somewhat of the ‘old school’, as he had been trained. He sported a nice ‘military’ moustache but he was rather distant – but perhaps there were serious and necessary matters of administration that required his attention first.

  *

  With the onset of winter on the Continent, the German and Allied forces facing each other were settling down to the period that was labelled the ‘Phoney War’. It was an uneasy peace, and it was false. What Pat probably did not know at this stage was that the Point Cook Class of 1936 had already suffered its first casualty of war.

  John Allsop had been sent to Bomber Command and posted to 10 Squadron where he flew Armstrong Whitworth Whitleys. Back on the night of 1/2 October he and his crew carried out a ‘Nickel’ (leaflet-dropping) operation over Berlin. A message was heard from his aircraft at 0505 hours during its return flight. Its position was roughly 180 miles east of St Abb’s Head, Berwickshire, Scotland. Then there was nothing. Despite an extensive search no trace of the aircraft or its crew was ever found. John had only recently married.

  6

  KATHLEEN

  Most people cherished the hope that the war might be over by Christmas. That is what they had hoped for in 1914, too. They had been drastically wrong then, and now they were drastically wrong again. In the north of England, the end of 1939 was accompanied in rapid succession by snow, frost, fog and heavy rain. In Lancashire, showers of sleet held up trains. On the Yorkshire hills between Burnley and Harrogate the snow was so deep that a snowplough had to clear the roads.

  With the New Year, the coldest winter for more than forty years crept all over the country. Everywhere, poorly protected pipes froze, expanded and burst, and the population shivered beside modest fires of rationed coal. Outside the small radius of heat these fires generated the houses and hotels felt as ‘cold as the arctic poles’. At night, heavy mists and the blackout made normally familiar city streets dark and menacing. Posters throughout England warned the public: ‘Children are safer in the country. Keep them there.’

  Hovering over it all was the grim spectre of fighting which could break out at any moment. Early in January, rumours of a Nazi invasion of the Netherlands because her water defences were frozen startled Europe for several days.

  The coldest day ever recorded in England up to then was 21 January 1940. In London, snow fell and lay deep, becoming as hard as iron beneath heavy frost. The Thames froze over at Kingston and ice extended for eight miles between Teddington and Sunbury. Twelve inches of ice covered lakes and reservoirs, and in Hyde Park people went skating on the Serpentine. Snow was still falling in mid-February.

  At Leconfield, creating an efficient training programme for 234 Squadron was enough of a challenge given such weather conditions, but not knowing what type of aircraft it would finally end up with did not help at all. Officially, Leconfield was in Fighter Command so eventually the squadron might have Hurricanes, Spitfires, Gladiators, Blenheims or perhaps even new two-seater Defiants. Each type required different skills, including basic flying practice and formation flying.

  By the end of January 1940 the squadron’s flying personnel consisted of one squadron leader, two flying officers (acting flight lieutenants) and twelve pilot officers. Of the other ranks, there were eighteen senior NCOs, twenty-six corporals and 163 aircraftmen. The squadron was equipped with nine Bristol Blenheims, two Miles Magisters, two Avro Tutors and one Fairey Battle.1 Given the numbers at this stage, Blenheim Ifs for long-range convoy cover or night fighting were becoming the strongest possibility – but there were no air gunners in the squadron, only pilots. Then, eleven men were despatched to train as air gunners. It had to be either Blenheims or Defiants.

  From a distance a Defiant looked like a Hurricane. It had a humped back, a large radiator under the centre fuselage and evenly tapered round-tipped wings. It sounded like a Hurricane or Spitfire because it had the same Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. But the hump looked bigger
than usual. On closer inspection, it wasn’t a hump at all … It was a gun turret! This was the RAF’s latest fighter, but it was a throwback to the two-seater fighter designs of the First World War – pilot in the front, gunner at the back. Advocates of the layout pointed to such outstandingly successful machines as the Sopwith 1½ Strutter and Bristol F2B Fighter and argued for a similar type of aircraft to replace the Hawker Demon. The revolutionary Merlin engine was combined with what was thought would be the devastating firepower of a hydraulically operated turret with four Browning machine guns. In theory, the 360-degree traverse of this turret would give greater flexibility to the crew as the aircraft would not need to manoeuvre into a position behind the enemy in order to fire with fixed forward-aimed armament. So certain were they that that this concept would work, Defiants were designed with no forward-firing armament at all! Defiants would be the RAF’s ‘bomber destroyers’.

  The possibility that the new Defiants would be for 234 Squadron was very unlikely. The assembly alone was slow and the first production examples of them were only going to only one unit, 264 Squadron. Hugh Dowding neither liked them nor wanted them, particularly with the outstanding and much needed Hurricanes and Spitfires coming into service at an improving rate.

  Pat would have even settled for old Gladiator biplanes. He could only glance every day with envy at 616 Squadron and its Spitfires, but the pilots were still having difficulties taking off and landing. The pilots of 234 Squadron came out one morning and found no fewer than three of 616’s Spitfires tilted up on their noses – a good way to bend propellers and break undercarriages! Meanwhile, 245 Squadron was in the same situation as 234 Squadron. It was still training with Blenheims and in January it received some Fairey Battles, but there was a rumour that there might be Hurricanes coming in March. There were always rumours. Anything could happen, but the poor weather was playing havoc with any proper practical training routine.